Thinking in Literature: On the Fascination and Power of Aesthetic Ideas. Translated from German by Joel Golb

M'illumino d'immenso - I'm lit with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction and literature's capacity according to Kant even to evoke with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable - in case studies about myths of creativity images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God' of the soul of melancholy as the dark ground of genius of metamorphoses of both evil and good of ecstasy of the economy of self-sacrifice of the art of resistance and among others about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality.